Saturday, March 19, 2011

Pope: violence in God’s name is inspired by the Antichrist

The Pope has condemned religiously motivated violence, describing it
as a “favourite instrument of the Antichrist” in his new book about the
life of Jesus published last week.

In Jesus of Nazareth – Holy Week:
From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, published by the
Catholic Truth Society, the Holy Father criticised the idea that
violence in the name of religion is justifiable.

Looking at the
way Christ was portrayed by theologians during the 1960s as a
revolutionary, Benedict XVI said that according to theologians of that
era Jesus belongs within the line of the Zealots, who rebelled against
the Roman Empire.

The Pope said: “The cleansing of the Temple
serves as the central proof of this thesis, since it was unambiguously
an act of violence that could not have been achieved without violence,
even though the evangelists did their best to conceal this. Moreover,
the fact that the people hailed Jesus as Son of David and harbinger of
the Davidic kingdom is construed as a political statement, and the
crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans for claiming to be ‘King of the Jews’
is seen as definitive proof that he was a revolutionary – a Zealot –
and that he was executed as such. The cruel consequences of religiously
motivated violence are only too evident to us all. Violence does not
build up the kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity. On the contrary,
it is a favourite instrument of the Antichrist, however idealistic its
religious motivation may be. It serves not humanity, but inhumanity.”

Jesus, he said, was not a Zealot. He rejected the idea of political
violence and his “whole ministry and his message … point in a radically
different direction”.

“No,” the Pope said, “violent revolution,
killing others in God’s name, was not his way. His ‘zeal’ for the
kingdom of God took quite a different form.

“In the just man
exposed to suffering, the memory of the disciples recognised Jesus: zeal
for God’s house leads him to the Passion, to the Cross. This is the
fundamental transformation that Jesus brought to the theme of
zeal-zelos. The ‘zeal’ that would serve God through violence he
transformed into the zeal of the Cross. Thus he definitively established
the criterion for true zeal – the zeal of self-giving love. This zeal
must become the Christian’s goal; it contains the authoritative answer
to the question about Jesus’s relation to the Zealot movement.”

The
Pope’s book was launched just days after the Holy See’s representative
to the United Nations urged the UN to reiterate that freedom of religion
was at the heart of fundamental human rights.

Archbishop Silvano
Tomasi, permanent representative of the Holy See to the UN in Geneva,
cited a statistic that 75 per cent of those killed because of their
religion across the world are Christian.

He was speaking at the 16th
ordinary session of the Human Rights Council on religious freedom.

Pope Benedict has consistently spoken out against religiously motivated
violence, including in his famous 2006 Regensburg lecture, in which he
said: “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of
the soul.”

He began the year by condemning sectarian violence, including attacks against Christians in the Middle East.

In
October he will host a meeting of religious leaders in Assisi to
discuss how they can promote peace, 25 years after Pope John Paul II
held a similar event.

But soon after the meeting was announced the
Islamic Research Council of the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, the
highest authority of Sunni Islam, said it was ending dialogue with the
Vatican after the Pope spoke out against anti-Christian violence in
Egypt.